Marketing content strategies for small business

Marketing content strategies for small business

There are many useful online content marketing strategies available which are very effective at bringing traffic to your website, boosting your businesses brand and establishing your business as an authority in the marketplace. The best part is — these marketing strategies are cheap compared to other methods of promoting your business. For a relatively small outlay, a business can obtain great exposure and drive sales.

Marketing online content can involve a variety of methods including social media, email newsletters, image sharing websites and videos. The content used can come in a variety of forms — white papers, infographics, tweets, full-length articles, instructional guides, videos and images. Whatever type of content you choose to produce, it must always be engaging, valuable content that is useful for the consumer.

Content and SEO marketing strategies can also be combined to target specific keywords that potential customers are searching for. Here are some simple strategies to help you make the most of your content marketing online!

Focus on the types of content you enjoy creating

It often helps to focus on creating the types of content which you are familiar with and enjoy making. For example, if you have some experience writing articles, focus on blogging and promoting that content via social media. If you have great presentation skills, consider recording useful instructional videos which you can upload to Youtube. It is better to create a small amount of very high-quality content rather than trying to do everything.

Create content that targets specific keywords

Content and SEO marketing go together very well — a strong, focused content campaign will positively affect search engine rankings. Perform keyword research to identify the specific keywords and keyword phrases that relate to your business and its products or services. Then, create content that targets those keywords.

This content will appear in search engines when a consumer uses one of those search terms, helping you to attract potential customers interested in a topic relating to your business. However, don’t get too carried away when using keywords — their overuse could be seen as “spammy” by search engines.

Get organised and use an editorial calendar

An editorial calendar is a way for businesses to organise the types of content they will create and the date it will be published. It is an important tool for managing your content marketing online, particularly if you are using different media channels that need to be coordinated.

To fill your editorial calendar, wrack your brain for 10-30 potential content topics then space them out over a month. Place a creation date and publication date for each piece of content on the editorial calendar. Then, add dates for various promotional activities relating to each piece of content — for example, when you intend to post links to the content on your businesses social media channels.

Your editorial calendar will help keep you on track and keep you motivated. It is also very useful for tying in pieces of content with events that your business is having including sales, announcements and product launches.

Focus on high-quality content and valuable topics

There are millions of pieces of content being added to the Internet each day. To separate your content from the pack, you should focus on generating high-quality content about topics that consumers are interested in. It takes time to create this kind of content, so be prepared to spend hours crafting it.

A useful strategy when marketing online content is to think about the “value” your content delivers. Consider these questions:

Is your content a well-researched piece that is original and informative?

Is the topic of interest to a lot of readers or is it so obscure that no one cares?

Is the content well-presented, easy to understand and free of grammatical or spelling errors?

Is this the kind of content that you think people would share with their friends or work colleagues?

If the answer to those questions is “Yes”, you are well on your way to having a successful online content marketing campaign.

Always promote your content

It is not enough to simply write a blog post or upload a video — your content must be promoted. Use every tool at your disposal to let people know you have just published some valuable content including social media (Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter), email newsletters and advertising.

Your business should also perform link building to promote your content. Link building is the act of getting links on third party websites that point to your content. This can be done manually by posting on blogs or discussion forums that relate to your businesses website.

Make your content easily sharableThe power of social media should not be underestimated. Not only does it allow people to share your content, search engines use social media as an indicator of how highly it should rank your content in search engine results. Encourage users to share your content by using social media buttons and software plugins that allow users to share quotes from your content.

Format content so it engages readers

When performing content marketing online, it is important to present your content appropriately for the Internet — where users tend to quickly skim web pages. To ensure your content remains engaging for readers, provide information in short segments on a page, separated by headings.

This allows users to quickly consume portions of the content and skim the page looking for sections they find interesting. Using headings also makes it easier for search engines to index your content and rank it for the appropriate keywords.

Focus on your blog

Content marketing and blogs go hand in hand. Your small business should use a blog as a central pillar of its content marketing strategy. Feature high-quality content on your blog and use excerpts on social media to drive consumers to it.

Use images to promote your business

While most businesses tend to focus their content creation strategy on written content, other forms of content can be very useful for some businesses. For example, a furniture company can post attractive images of their products to Instagram where they can be shared by users.

This strategy can potentially result in a stream of consumers looking to buy the pieces featured on the website. The key here is to make the images absolutely stunning and something that Instagram users would enjoy sharing.

Consistently post content

Once you have decided on a content marketing strategy it is important to stick with it and post your content consistently. It may take weeks or months before the strategy pays off, so remain consistent and be patient. If you are blogging for your business and looking to improve your SEO results, the experts at Problogger.net suggest you should focus on producing high-quality content, even if you can only produce it infrequently.

Hubspot suggests that small businesses should post content to their blog at least 11 times a month. They also found that blogs tend to really take off once they have 400 or more posts. If you can create 3 or more high-quality posts each week on your business blog, you are in a great position to make the most of online content marketing!